Magic Elizabeth Page 3

  She looked sharply at Sally, who looked back, unmoving. Something flickered in Aunt Sarah’s eyes. If it had been anyone else, Sally would have thought it was concern or kindness. But since it was Aunt Sarah — Sally turned her head away again. “I hope I’m not getting a cold,” thought Sally, remembering the rain the night before. “Then she’ll really be mad at me.”

  Her eyes moved to the windows. A maple tree was looking in through both of them. She wondered if it could be one tree. If so, it was a very large one. She blinked at the brilliant gold-and-green light that glittered in the moving leaves. Between two swaying branches she could see what looked like the corner of an old barn.

  She raised herself on one elbow and looked up at her aunt, seeing her now through a moving blur of light. She blinked again. “Is that a barn?” she asked, before she could help herself. She didn’t really like to ask Aunt Sarah anything at all.

  “Yes,” said her aunt. “This house used to be a farmhouse a long time ago, at the edge of a little town called Forest Valley.”

  Sally looked at the painting above the fireplace.

  “Yes,” said her aunt, following her gaze to the painting. “This was all country around here when she lived here. None of these buildings —” she waved an arm to indicate the apartment buildings on all sides of them. “But breakfast is almost ready,” she said. “We’ll see you downstairs shortly.” Aunt Sarah turned and walked out the door.

  Shadow growled low in his throat, flicked a glance at Sally, and jumped off the bed to follow Aunt Sarah out.

  As soon as they had gone, Sally jumped out of bed and ran to a window to look out. She could see now that it was indeed one enormous maple tree that showed at both windows. The tree seemed absorbed in shaking raindrops from its leaves. One leaf lay like a hand against a windowpane. Sally placed her hand over it. A wide margin of the sharp-edged leaf showed all around her hand, which looked quite small against it. How large the leaf was! She had never seen one so big. She supposed that the tree, like the house, must be very old.

  She peered down through the moving leaves into what seemed at first to be a rippling green sea. Her room was at the back of the house, and she was looking down into what must once have been the garden. Now it was a blowing field of foxtails, tall grass, and Queen Anne’s lace. Blue and yellow butterflies rocked like tiny boats on the billowing green. The fur of the foxtails flared in the sun. Raindrops sparkled on the grass and weeds. The leaves of the apple trees — there were a number of them — were still shiny with rain.

  Tall apartment buildings rose on either side and at the far end of the yard. How stiffly the red-brick buildings, their windows silver with raindrops, stood there enclosing the leaping garden. They might have been forbidding it to move on any further. For it seemed that the wild tangly growth out there meant to do so if it could. Already it was lapping up the sides of the apartment buildings in vines, perhaps planning to creep over the top of them to the other side. The old barn slanted alarmingly beneath the vines, which nearly covered it. Its roof was sinking in the middle, as if the vines were working from inside too.

  A row of pine trees at the back of the yard might have been the beginning of a deep forest, had it not been for the tall building just behind. The vines were busy there too, winding up into the pine trees and dragging their branches down. They had even crawled into the apple trees, so that the green-and-yellow apples looked as if they were growing from the vines. Bushes were bowed down by them. Even the grass and weeds were woven together in some places into little knotted bouquets.

  How pretty it all was! If Aunt Sarah’s appearance had been like a bad dream, this was certainly a good one.

  Sally leaned on the window sill and gazed down, feeling indeed as if she might be dreaming.

  In all that moving green, a tiny flash of red caught Sally’s eye just then in the crack between the barn doors. She pressed her face against the glass and stared out at it. She wondered what it could be.

  How she longed to be out there, feeling the breeze lifting her hair. She turned her cheek to the cool glass, imagining how it would be. She wanted to wade through that sea of green, the foxtails tickling her knees. She wanted to peek into the barn, perhaps even go inside. What had it been like when the other Sally lived here? she wondered.

  How quiet the room seemed behind her. The furniture was as stiff as the buildings. The only movement in the room was the flicker of leaf shadow over the walls and floor. Only the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall broke the absolute stillness of the house.

  Just then there came a metallic clatter from the kitchen, reminding her that Aunt Sarah was waiting. She sighed and turned from the window. Maybe after breakfast she could go outside, if she could work up the courage to ask.

  They ate breakfast at the big round table in the dining room, seated in high-backed gilded chairs with red velvet seats. Sally thought that they were quite a lot like thrones. Beside them, on a shelf beneath a bay window, stood a pot of tall ferns, looking like a miniature forest.

  “Bought that the first day I was here,” Aunt Sarah explained. “Shadow likes something green in the house, to nibble.” And sure enough, just then Shadow, who had been cleaning his paws beneath the table, jumped up on the shelf and delicately nipped at a frond of fern.

  Beyond the window, at the end of the rippling garden, Sally could see the row of pine trees, seeming even more like a real forest than they had from upstairs, for from where she was sitting she could see nothing of the building behind them through the thick branches. How dark and mysterious they looked, even by daylight!

  They had very little to say to each other during breakfast, although Sally was bursting with questions such as, “What is that red I saw in the barn?” and “Can’t I please play outside?” But every time that she peeked across the table at Aunt Sarah’s stern-lipped face, her courage failed her.

  Sally sneezed.

  Her aunt looked up. “That doesn’t sound good,” she said. “You’d better stay inside this morning, Sally. You may play in the parlor or anywhere you like in the house, if you are careful not to break anything, but you’d better not go into the attic. It’s much too dusty and dirty up there.” And she stood up, excused herself, and went into the kitchen.

  Sally looked up from her plate, pushed her chair back, stood up, and wandered into the big parlor that she had glimpsed the night before through the bead curtains.

  As she came into the room, she surprised Shadow, who jumped into the air and skidded across the shiny floor on a small rug, giving a startled “m-row” as he went. Sally clapped her hand to her mouth, and out came a sound that was very much like a strangled laugh.

  “Cats,” said Aunt Sarah’s voice, “are very dignified, and do not like to be laughed at.” Sally looked up to see her standing, a broom in one hand, just beyond the bead curtains in the front hall. Shadow walked through the curtains to her, and Aunt Sarah picked him up. Sally could see the glitter of his fiery eyes in the dim hallway, and then both of them disappeared. Tears started in Sally’s eyes and blurred the hanging beads so that they looked like the glitter of Shadow’s eyes, endlessly repeated. She angrily brushed the tears away. “I didn’t mean anything wrong,” she whispered. But she’d done it again. There seemed to be no pleasing Aunt Sarah. “She doesn’t like me any more than I like her,” she thought. “She’s afraid I’ll hurt her old house, or her cat.”

  “I’m going out for a short time,” called Aunt Sarah. Sally jumped and looked to see that she had reappeared behind the bead curtains. She was wearing a hat, and was drawing white gloves over her fingers. “I’ll leave Shadow with you,” she said, and she was gone, the door opening to let a flood of sunlight into the hall and then closing with a soft thud that was like the sound of darkness returning to the hall. Sally ran to a window and peeked out. She watched her aunt go down the path, through the little iron gate; and then she watched as her aunt’s profile, beneath the black hat, sailed grimly along over the tops of the bushes.<
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  Sally turned and faced the room. She was alone, she thought. “I’m all alone,” she said aloud, trying her voice to see how it sounded in the still room. It sounded very small indeed, and rather frightened besides. How very big the house felt suddenly. The long beaded strings of the curtain, which had been disturbed by the opening and closing of the door, still clicked softly together. Sally sat down on a tiny flowered stool before the fireplace, which was of green marble like the one in her room, only much larger. As she did so, she heard again the tiny tremble of music she had heard the night before in the hall. And her eyes found, between two velvet-draped windows, what must be the melodeon.

  Sally walked over to it. It was a very pretty and graceful instrument, rather like a small piano. Its wood was highly polished, and smelled faintly of lemon. She shyly touched one of the yellowed keys, and the tinkly musical note flew lightly about the room. “What a pretty thing it is,” she thought. “Imagine it belonging to Aunt Sarah.” For it was as unlike her as anything could be — very dainty, and possessing a most beautiful voice.

  She turned from the melodeon to look at the rest of the room, which became clearer as the music died away. She became aware, too, of the sounds of traffic in the street — cars and trucks passing, horns honking and heels clicking — loud for a time, then fading away to be replaced by other sounds. She thought again that the furniture looked very old, as if it must remember a time when the noises outside were quite different. Most of it was upholstered in some kind of velvet, worn dull in spots and shiny in others. The wood that framed many of the chairs and love seats was carved with flowers and bunches of grapes. Maybe it had looked like this when the other Sally lived here, she thought. The gas jet in the fireplace was lighted, and the line of flickering blue flames made a comforting bubbling sound in the otherwise quiet room.

  Two tall cupboards with rounded glass fronts stood against one wall, looking like a pair of prim old-fashioned ladies. Sally walked across the room to peer into them, wondering at their contents. She had never been in a house like this before. Everything, even Aunt Sarah, seemed to have come from another time.

  One cupboard held a set of teacups and saucers, and beside them was another set exactly the same, except that these were doll-sized. She wondered if they had belonged to the other Sally, and she longed to touch them, but did not dare to open the cupboard. One of the tiny cups, she could see, had lost a handle. The cups, brushed with gold inside, were so thin that she could see through them, as if they were really the ghosts of cups used here long ago. She imagined the rustle of the ladies’ long skirts as their hands gently lifted the fragile cups. Perhaps the other Sally had sat on the fireplace stool, holding her doll and watching them, and the room was lit by candles — no — she looked at the line of blue flames in the fireplace — gaslights, maybe that’s what they had then.

  She sighed and moved on to another cupboard, this one a jumble of huge sea shells, pink, violet, bone-white. They looked, she thought, with their open ends toward her, as if they were all humming with the sound of the sea, which she knew she would hear if she opened the cupboard door, took one out, and held it to her ear. She wondered if the humming of so many shells would fill the room if she were to open the door.

  But she moved restlessly on, with an odd feeling that she was looking for something, though she didn’t know what. She peeked behind chairs and behind the large gold fan that seemed to have been pushed aside when the gas was lighted in the fireplace. She smoothed out the wrinkle in the rug behind it. She even looked under the cushions of the davenport. It was while she was straightening the last cushion that the glitter of one of the tiny teacups caught her eye.

  “The doll!” she whispered. “I wish I could find the doll!” What if the doll were still in the house? What if she could find her? What if she explored the whole house, even — the word “attic” flashed into her mind, and her thoughts went bounding up the stairs to a mysterious place at the top of the house, a place Aunt Sarah had called dusty and dirty. But hadn’t Aunt Sarah said something else about the attic, the night before, in her room — something about old things being stored in the attic, the old things in the picture?

  Sally sat down again upon the little flowered stool.

  “Aunt Sarah said not to go up there,” she told herself.

  “But she isn’t here,” she answered, “and besides, she said I’d ‘better not.’ That isn’t exactly the same, is it?”

  “She’ll be awfully mad if she comes back and finds me poking around up there.” She was already standing up.

  “Well, I’ll hurry and I won’t hurt anything. I’ll just look. This might be my only chance to go up there.”

  She could feel the huge dark attic yawning far, far above her, beneath the tall trees that shaded the house. And she shivered. Attics were full of black shadows and queer shapes, especially strange attics — and especially forbidden attics.

  But she found herself at the bead curtains.

  She pushed through them into the hall. Her knees were shaking, but she made herself go on, up the long stairway, touching the cold foot of the stone angel for good luck.

  She had forgotten all about Shadow.

  Chapter 5 - The Attic

  Sally did not notice, as she made her way up the winding staircase, that Shadow was following close behind. She was hurrying, sometimes taking two steps at a time, for she felt that there was no time to lose. Aunt Sarah might return at any moment.

  As she stepped onto the carpet of red flowers in the upper hall, the grandfather clock at the other end of the hall gave the loud click which came before its chiming, as if the clock had to take a deep breath before beginning the hard work of telling the hour. Sally jumped nervously. “Shh,” she whispered to the clock, but it went slowly on with its chiming. Standing there, looking down the long expanse of hall at the enormous clock, she felt as if it was speaking to her. “From now on,” it seemed to be saying, “things will be different.” The deep tones vibrated through her body, as if the upstairs had become the inside of a great clock. The very walls trembled. She felt trapped there, unable to move until the clock finished. Behind her, Shadow stopped to lick a paw. As the deep notes died away, and the melodeon shivered a tiny response from the parlor, she listened for a moment, and hearing nothing at all downstairs she took a deep breath and began to step very quietly from flower to flower upon the carpet, as if they were stones in a stream she must cross. Shadow silently followed.

  Of the many doors on either side of the hall, the only ones Sally was sure about were her own, second from the end on the left side, and the bathroom, right next to it. Which one of all the others could be the door to the attic?

  Sally opened the first door she came to. From the shadowy room behind it her own face looked out at her, and she heard a whisper of movement. Her heart gave a great thump. “The other Sally!” she thought. But it was only her own reflection in a tall gold-framed mirror that stood in the center of the room. There was nothing else at all in the room. The sun, coming through the drawn shades at two windows, made yellow rectangles of light upon the bare wooden floor. It was the long curtains on the windows that had stirred at the opening of the door, and made the whispering sound that had frightened her. She drew a shaky breath and gently closed the door. She went on to the next room. In here she found a bed so high that a little pair of polished steps led up to it. A ruffled white canopy supported by slender posts seemed to be floating high above the bed. It was a bed such as she had seen before only in pictures, and it was very beautiful. A pale green rug of a soft furry material lay upon the polished floor, looking like the fur of some animal dreamed by whoever slept in that strange bed. A closet door stood slightly open, and stepping a little into the room, she peered into it. Something black was hanging there, swaying a little. The dress Aunt Sarah had worn yesterday! Then this was her room! The beautiful bed was her bed! She turned and ran the few steps to the door, and hurried out of the room, shutting the door behind her.

/>   She opened the next door. A wooden stairway showed faintly in the light from the hall. It rose steeply up from the doorway and disappeared into the deeper darkness of what must be the attic. Sally could hear a tiny pattering sound somewhere up there. Her knees began to shake again, and she would have closed the door and scurried back downstairs had it not been for the doll. “She might be up there,” she told herself, “she might.” But what would she do if she did find her? Aunt Sarah would never let her keep the doll. But she’d think about that later. There wasn’t much time. She could hear the grandfather clock ticking and ticking.

  There was a light switch on the wall, and she clicked it on as she started up the stairs. A dull watery light appeared above her, but the attic was still much too dark for comfort. Heart pounding, she continued up the stairs. She heard the pattering sound again, and just then something soft brushed against her leg. She was so startled that she scarcely kept herself from falling. For one terrible moment she imagined that the green rug on Aunt Sarah’s floor had followed her. She stood there in a panic, not knowing which way to go, and then she saw that it was not the rug at all but Shadow, who had run ahead of her up the stairs. She looked up the long stairway. She could see dust drifting in clouds, slow and dreamlike in the faint light up there, and farther back the deep blackness into which Shadow had disappeared. She swallowed the lump in her throat and hesitated. She could hear Shadow moving around, bumping across the floor, and she was afraid of him, afraid of meeting his narrow green eyes staring at her from some dark corner —

  But at that moment she heard the creak of the branches of the tall trees which grew over the house, and then again the faint pattering. She looked up. The sound seemed to be coming from very high up, from the roof even. “Why,” she thought, “that must be squirrels. They must jump down from the trees and run across the roof.”